Irina Ionesco posing at her appartment. Gothic icon and "grande dame" of photographic erotica, Irina Ionesco, is back in the public eye at almost 75 with more of her often-controversial black-and-white works. AFP PHOTO FRANCOIS GUILLOT.

PARIS (AFP).- A Paris court Monday ordered French-Romanian photographer Irina Ionesco to pay 10,000 euros in damages to her daughter for taking explicit pictures of her in the 1970s, when she was between four and 12.

The court also ordered Ionesco to hand over negatives of the pictures to her daughter Eva, a French actress who said she had suffered a "stolen childhood" because of the photographs.

But it rejected her demand for 200,000 euros ($263,000) in damages and for her mother to be barred from profiting from the photographs.

Ionesco was well-known in the 1970s for her erotic photographs, especially the controversial ones of her daughter, which appeared in a number of publications including European editions of magazines Playboy and Penthouse.

The photographs of Ionesco were taken in the 1970s between the ages of four and 12 by her photographer mother Irina. They were explicit and Ionesco, who is evoking a "stolen childhood", also wants them returned to her.

Ionesco became the youngest model to appear nude in Playboy when she featured aged 11 in an October 1976 edition. Her photographs as a child were also published in Penthouse.

Her lawyer Jacques-Georges Bitoun told the court that the 1970s "were an era when paedophile networks still had a lot of influence".

"How can one open the legs of a four year old girl and take a snap?" he said.

"If art is photographing a child in these positions, I understand nothing of art," he said, adding: "The child is never presented as a child" but as a "disguised prostitute".

Irina Ionesco's lawyer Rene-Jean Ullmann argued that the 1970s were a "more permissive" time and spoke of the actress's alleged "hatred for her mother".